While smoking a pipe.Every time you mention one of these I keep reading it as being about the 2010s synthpop artist fighting aliens.
While smoking a pipe.Every time you mention one of these I keep reading it as being about the 2010s synthpop artist fighting aliens.
nothing wrong with books where fuck all happens! Altho as I am currently reading a Virginia Woolf, I am almost obliged to say that.77. Samantha Harvey - Orbital [audiobook]
Not sure what I thought about that. Parts of it were quite lyrical and beautiful but on the whole it's a fictional account of a single day on the ISS where literally nothing happens. Should this really have won the Booker prize this year?
Yes it reminded me of To The Lighthouse a bit. I can't stand that eithernothing wrong with books where fuck all happens! Altho as I am currently reading a Virginia Woolf, I am almost obliged to say that.
This will count as book 46.95 in a tie break situation...1/30 The Damned Utd by David Peace
2/30 I, Partridge We need to talk about Alan by Alan Partridge
3/30 No Way Down by Graham Bowley.
4/30 Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming
5/30 Every second counts by Lance Armstrong
6/30 The Dead House by Harry Bingham
7/30 Underground Airline by Ben Winters
8/30 Who they was by Gabriel Krause
9/30 The Last - Hanna Jameson
10/30 The Night Visitors by Carol Goodman.
11/30 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
12/30 The Unfolding by AM Homes
13/30 Clothes, music, boys by Viv Albertine
14/30 Misery by Stephen King
15/30 The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
16/30 Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
17/30 Down River by John Hart
18/30 Magic Seeds by VS Naipaul
19/30 In our mad and furious city by Guy Gunaratne
20/30 The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
21/30 The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945–1957 by Frank Dikötter
22/30 The Devil's Playground by Stav Sherez
23/30 The Ticket Collector from Belarus by Mike Anderson & Neil Hanson
24/30 Countdown City by Ben Winters
25/30 The Seventh Victim by Michael Wood
26/30 A death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger
27/30 Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel
28/30 Spies by Michael Frayn.
29/30 All quiet on the Western front by Erich Maria Remarque
30/30 When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
31/30 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (and other stories) by Alan Sillitoe
32/30 Alone on the Ice by David Robert
33/30 The only story by Julian Barnes
34/30 An experiment in love by Hilary Mantel
35/30 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
36/30 Exit by Belinda Bauer
37/30 I, Partridge: We need to talk about Alan by Alan Partridge (again). I read the book and/or listen to the audiobook a couple of times a year
38/30 History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
39/30 Jeeves and the feudal spirit by PG Wodehouse
40/30 On The Road Bike: The Search For A Nation’s Cycling Soul by Ned Boulting
41/30 The Crow Road by Iain Banks
42/30 The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch
43/30 The last days of Mussolini by FW Deakin
44/30 Travels with my aunt by Graham Greene
45/30 Promise me by Harlan Coben
46/30 Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell
47/30 Snowblind by Robert Sabbag. Tedious true account of the career of a notorious American cocaine smuggler. There's a foreword by Howard Marks that I couldn't be bothered to read
I read Camp Concentration when I was 13 or 14. I was lent it by an anarchist member of staff at the boarding school I attended.1/45 John Fowles - The Collector
2/3 Mario Tronti - Workers and Capital (Marx, Labour-Power, Working Class)
2/45 Claire Dederer - Monsters
3/3-3/45 Mario Tronti - Workers and Capital (Postscript and Appendix)
4/45 Josh Davidson and Eric King (eds) - Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners
5/45 Charlie Squire - Slouching: A Field Guide to Art and (Un-) Belonging in Europe
6/45 Alasdair Gray - 1982, Janine
7/45 Isaac Rose - The Rentier City
8/45 Gemma Fairclough - Bear Season
9/45 PG Wodehouse - Carry On, Jeeves
10/45 Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead
11/45 Willa Cather - My Antonia
12/45 Anne Boyer - Garments Against Women
13/45 Richard Wright - Native Son
14/45 Saul Bellow - Humboldt's Gift
15/45 John Berger and Jean Mohr - Another Way of Telling
16/45 Tao Lin - Leave Society
17/45 Miranda July - All Fours
18/45 Meg Mason - Sorrow and Bliss
19/45 Hilary White - Holes
20/45 Jane Bowles - Two Serious Ladies
21/45 Jane Huffman - Public Abstract
22/45 Alexander Billet - Shake the City
23/45 Patricia Lockwood - Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
24/45 George Katsiaficas - The Subversion of Politics
25/45 Torrey Peters - Detransition, Baby
26/45 Joan Didion - Let Me Tell You What I Mean
27/45 James Ellroy - Perfidia
28/45 Don DeLillo - White Noise
29/45 Colson Whitehead - Zone One
30/45 Dickhead Bidge - Bakunin Brand Vodka: Anarchism in Early Punk, 1976-1980
31/45 Thomas M Disch - Camp Concentration
32/45 RF Kuang - Babel
Harry Potter and the Wretched of the Earth.
Extremely mixed feelings about this one. Tempting to say it's a good book about language and a bad book about empire. She really needs an editor who would ruthlessly trim out a lot of the footnotes and it totally fails as a historical novel because all the goodies just seem to have acceptable 21st century lefty opinions and even the baddies often sound like they've been reading contemporary literary criticism. But a lot of the language and translation stuff is really good and once it hits its stride in the last 150 pages or so it's hard not to get a bit drawn in to the attempt to imagine a revolution in England. There is a lot to consider about the relationship between Kuang and her protagonist as well, like what does it mean if you go to Oxford, graduate and then go on to write a novel about how the only ethical thing an Oxford student can do is to drop out and dedicate themselves to violent insurrection?
Now starting (and halfway though) Jen Calleja - Goblinhood. Not much in the way of mixed feelings about this one, it's just a bonkers delight.
No- it was reasonably enjoyable, but nothing special.1. Karl Stock - Comic Book Punks: How a Generation of Brits Reinvented Pop Culture
2. John Wagner, Alan Grant - Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files vol 07
3. Terry Pratchett - The Carpet People
4. Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (reread)
5. Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby - Survival Geeks
6. Paul Baker - Fabulousa!: the Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language
7. Rachel Joyce - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
8. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
9. Neil Gaiman - Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
10. Pat Mills, Gerry Finley-Day - Dan Dare: the 2000AD Years - vol 1
11. Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
12. Ian Edginton, Leigh Gallagher - Kingmaker
13. Iain Banks - Walking on Glass
14. David Lodge - Changing Places
15. Gerry Finley-Day, Alan Davis - Harry 20 on the High Rock
16. CLR James, Nik Watts, Sakina Karimjee - Toussaint Louverture: the Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History
17. David Lodge - Small World
18. David Lodge - Nice Work
19. Jah Wobble - Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer, the expanded edition
20. Alan McKenzie, John Ridgway - The Journal of Luke Kirby
21. Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls
22. Helene Lee - The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism
23. Ryszard Kapuscinski - The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat [Haile Selassie I]
24. Alec Worsley, Ben Willsher - Durham Red: Born Bad
25. Edwin A Abbott - Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions
26. Gail Honeyman - Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
27. Ian Mortimer - Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter
28. John Tomlinson, Simon Jacob - Armoured Gideon
29. Robin Hardy, Anthony Shaffer - The Wicker Man
30. Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram - Head North: a Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain
31. Taylor Jenkins Reid - Daisy Jones & the Six
32. Dan Abnett, Phil Winslade - Lawless: Breaking Badrock
33. Terry Pratchett - Jingo
34. Huey Morgan - Rebel Heroes: The Renegades of Music and Why We Still Need Them (audiobook)
35. Andrew White - Lancaster: a history
36. Ian Edgington, D'Israeli - Scarlet Traces vol 2
37. Mark Millar, Richard Eldon, Al Ewing, Chris Weston - The Best of Tharg's Terror Tales
38. Katja Hoyer - Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990
39. Randall Munro [xkcd comics] - What If? 2: Additional Serious Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
40. Alan Grant, Emma Beeby, Maura McHugh - Anderson, Psi-Division: NWO
41. Guy Adams, Jimmy Broxton - Hope
42. Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
43. Robert Morrison - The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World
44. John Wagner, David Hine, Nick Percival - Dominion
45. David Mitchell - Unruly: a History of England's Kings and Queens [audiobook]
46. David Hine, Nick Percival - The Dark Judges: Deliverance
47. Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent
48. Bernard Cornwell - The Winter King
49. Pat Mills, Patrick Goddard - Savage: The Marze Murderer
50. Arthur Wyatt, Jake Lynch - Judge Dredd: The Red Queen Saga
51. Tom Tully, Vanyo - The Mind of Wolfie Smith
52. Maurice LeBlanc - The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
53. Everett True - Hey Ho Let's Go: The Story of the Ramones
54. Stuart Maconie - The Full English: a Journey in Search of a Country and its People [audiobook]
55. Chris Lowder, Gerry Finley Day, Dave Gibbons - Dan Dare: The 2000AD Years - vol 2
56. H G Wells - The Island of Doctor Moreau
57. Dan Abnett, Mark Harrison - The Out
58. Terry Pratchett - Carpe Jugulum
59. T C Eglington, Simon Davis - Thistlebone
60. David Katz - Solid Foundation: an Oral History of Reggae
61. Torsten Bell - Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back [audiobook]
62. Michael Morpurgo - War Horse
63. P G Wodehouse - School Stories
64. Michael Fleisher, Steve Dillon - The New Harlem Heroes vol 1
65. David Barnett - Withered Hill
66. John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra - Strontium Dog: the Starlord Years
67. Stuart Maconie - The Pie at Night: In Search of the North at Play
68. Michael Fleischer, Ron Smith - Rogue Trooper: Friday vol 1
69. HP Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
70. Varaidzo - Manny and the Baby
71. Dan Abnett, Richard Elson - Feral and Foe
72. Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything [audiobook]
73. Terry Pratchett - The Fifth Elephant
74. Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith - A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
75. Pat Mills - M.A.C.H.-1 vol 1
76. Natalie Whittle - Crunch: an Ode to Crisps
77. Samantha Harvey - Orbital [audiobook]
Not sure what I thought about that. Parts of it were quite lyrical and beautiful but on the whole it's a fictional account of a single day on the ISS where literally nothing happens. Should this really have won the Booker prize this year?
I'm approaching the end of A visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford. It's a travelogue to Mexico in the '40s. She has an interesting story..I heartily recommend1/30 - Lexie Conyngham - Tomb for an Eagle
2/30 - Michael Eaton - B*llocks -A Word on Trial
3/30 - Paul Simpson - Revolutionary Spirit
4/30 - Joe Thomas - Red Menace
5/30 - Daniel Clowes - Monica
6/30 - Will Sergeant - Echoes
7/30 - Wu Ming - 54
8/30 - Kathleen Hanna - Rebel Girl, my life as a feminist punk
9/30 - Aldous Huxley - The Devils of Loudon
10/30 - Volodomyr Ishchenko - Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War
11/30 - Dan Kavanagh - Duffy
12/30 - Samantha Schweblin - Little Eyes
13/30 - Tabitha Stanmore - Cunning Folk: Life in the Age of Practical Magic
14/30 - Nathalie Olah - Bad Taste
15/30 - Luke Haines - Freaks Out! Weirdos, Misfits & Deviants - The Rise and Fall of Righteous Rock 'n' Roll
16/30 - Willy Vlautin - The Horse
17/30 - Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Silver Nitrate
18/30 - Geoff Nicholson - The Surburbanist
19/30 - Jacqueline Pearce - From Byfleet to the Bush
20/30 - Sharon Bennett Connolly - Women of the Anarchy
21/30 - Mark E Smith & Graham Duff - The Otherwise
22/30 - Benjamin Myers - Rare Singles
23/30 - Marilyn Robinson - Gilead
24/30 - Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
25/30 - Aldous Huxley - Grey Eminence
26/30 - Werner Herzog - Every Man for Himself and God Against All
27/30 - Hunter S Thompson - Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, interviews with HST
28/30 - Jeffrey Lewis - Leonard Cohen
29/30 - Virginia Woolf - The Years
The last novel published in her lifetime and despite bring the best seller of her career at that point, it is one of the least loved now. Officially that is mostly down to it not meeting the plans VW had for it (to incorporate it with one of best known long essays, Three Guineas), but I suspect that it is rather more to do with the racism. The characters' racism obviously, not the sainted Virginia. Excluding the, relatively few but still far too many, such references, it starts very like a Virginia Woolf book, some of the stream of consciousness stuff really is a stream, she make sit flow so much better than other writers. Stuff actually happens! Although always just off the page..... Quite interesting for a most of it, but that last chapter was way too long and I wanted it to be over.
So, 29 out of 30, one book to go. A quick calculation indicates I've had an even split between fiction and non-fiction (the Eaton is a bit of both), 19-10 male v female, tho its 8-7 considering the books I actually chose for myself. I've read my annual Virginia (tho I'll hopefully choose more wisely next time) and the Huxley's count as classics, so that's that ticked off as well. I think I should read another book by a woman, but should it be the worthy one (biography of Hannah Arendt) or a more fun pice of fiction? I really must do Pride & Prejudice or Tenant of Wildfell Hall at some point as well.
1/15 - The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
2/15 - Uprooted by Naomi Novik
3/15 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
4/15 - Circe by Madeline Miller
5/15 - The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (reread)
6/15 - The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben
7/15 - The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
8/15 - Complete Land Law: Text, Cases, and Materials by Roger Sexton, Barbara Bogusz
9/15 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
10/15 - Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
11/15 - Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
12/15 - Vilnius. Wilno. Vilna. Three Short Stories by Kristina Sabaliauskaitė
13/15 - Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval by Gaia Vince
14/15 - The Official DVSA Theory Test for Car Drivers by DVSA
15/15 - The Official Highway Code by DVSA
16/15 - Autumn Chills by Agatha Christie
17/15 - Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
18/15 - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
19/15 - Granta 168: Significant Other
I think I should read another book by a woman, but should it be the worthy one (biography of Hannah Arendt) or a more fun pice of fiction?
Ah, my book group nearly just voted to read that, but ended up going with Our Wives Under the Sea instead.77. Samantha Harvey - Orbital [audiobook]
Not sure what I thought about that. Parts of it were quite lyrical and beautiful but on the whole it's a fictional account of a single day on the ISS where literally nothing happens. Should this really have won the Booker prize this year?
Huh, I did just have a conversation with my little sister about Pynchon this week, I've never read him and asked if he's funny at least, she said yes but it's a bit like a 900-page version of Looney Tunes.20/15 - Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. "A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's still human"
The author is clearly widely read and I'm impressed with their erudition, but who was the wimp who edited it? I am waiting for the one non-reference book that can show me it's worth 900 pages, but it might not exist. In this novel, the writing is strong and some of it is quite touching and funny, although a lot of the humour is frame-by-frame slapstick, like reading a comic book.